#beforan ancestors

[nekropsii]

What is the deal with the pre-scratch version of the Beta Trolls?

As in, the Beforan Ancestors? There isn’t much of a “deal” with them. We’re given no information on them - and surprisingly, I never really speculated on it all that much. If anyone tells you there is a concrete, canonical “deal” with them, they are lying to you.

We can only really make things up based on the information given to us about Beforus.

I do have a friend with quite interesting thoughts on Beforan Feferi and Kanaya, but I’ll leave it up to him whether or not he wants to divulge his takes…

[alphancestors-zine]

HAPPY APRIL 13th! The Alphancestors Zine is officially RELEASED! Thanks to everybody who helped contribute to this project, without you, this amazing work wouldn't be out now!

Please go check it out! <3

[dedicatedfollower467]

HEY SO I'M GONNA RANT ABOUT MY BEFORAN KARKAT HEADCANONS HERE because i know you won't mind and also i just. have so many thoughts.

we're all in agreement that Signless/Sufferer is Troll Jesus this is obvious and also like. duh.

so obviously Beforan Karkat should be the troll equivalent of some old testament patriarch yes? yes. clearly.*

*BIG FUCKING ASTERISK: i'm analyzing this from a christian perspective specifically because signless is troll jesus, with specifically christian imagery and theming, and i feel it's appropriate to extend the christian imagery further back into beforus, rather than trying to take a "judeo-christian" or purely jewish read on it. yes there's a lot of issues with the fact that christianity has co-opted jewish religious texts for its own gain, but you have to acknowledge that the old testament is an intrinsic part of christianity as a religion and the christian mythos as a framework for critical reading ASTERISK OVER

OPTION NUMBER ONE: Beforan Karkat is Troll King David

i don't personally like this theory that much, but it fits with the idea of the cancer sign being a kind of religious/mystical symbol (as an analog of the star of david). in a christian-centric reading of the text, it also has some fun explicit parallels to david being the ancestor of jesus, and beforan karkat being the ancestor of alternian kankri who would become the signless.

if we decide to posit beforan karkat as troll king david that implies some fun stuff:

Emperor/Condesce Karkat is now a possibility for the folks who like that trope

who can we cast as Goliath?

who can we cast as King Saul? (the previous condesce maybe? feferi?)

best part of all, who do we get to cast as Bathsheba? (or her husband Uriah?)

does this make kankri SOLOMON???

god you KNOW kankri thinks Troll King David was soooooo fucking problematic, he got a guy killed so he could steal his matesprit!

OPTION NUMBER TWO: Beforan Karkat is Troll Moses

I CAME UP WITH THIS THEORY AGES AGO AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH IT FITS SO WELL.

karkat as troll moses would be a member of a despised/denigrated caste (mutant red blood), who was slated for death at birth but was saved by the kindly pharaoh's daughter empress and given to his actual mother a wet nurse a suitably subservient jade blood (beforan kanaya) to be raised. he would grow up privileged and in the lap of luxury, but would discover the plight of the rest of his low blood caste shortly after becoming an adult. he would rebel against the pharaoh empress and then run off into the desert, where he'd join a band of nomadic shepherds lost weaboos. eventually he'd be called back to set his people free, but obviously he'd do so in a way that would piss kankri the hell off because it's too full of swearing and violence, and it wouldn't actually work perfectly and he wouldn't live to see the fruits of his labor.

anyway this also obviously gives lots of room for recasting the story, such as:

beforan feferi as pharaoh

beforan kanaya obviously gets to be an amalgam of moses's mother and sister (in the same way that the Disciple manages to be Mary Magdelene, St. Paul AND St. John all at once)

aaron could be basically anyone and who you cast in that roll can really change the story

zipporah is the same way, you can throw pretty much anyone in there and see how the story changes

burning bush??? god??? maybe some plagues? lots of fun to be had with that.

ten commandments totally gives kankri bullshit to complain and nitpick about too

unfortunately moses doesn't have a lot of specific imagery to throw around to be karkat's sign that later becomes kankris but listen. I HAVE THOUGHTS.

[empyrealwinter]

Posting this again cause honestly I wish this got more attention.

So here's my idea for a beforan version of karkat as kankris ancestor drawn as one of those portraits of the original ancestors

[karkatting]

its halloween

[cutthroatcarnifex-ooc]

Little baby doodles of another troll of mine... Gallay Moibie... This is him on Beforus he's the Culler of Beforus!Finley Tantia

Here's him on Alternia (once again rough sketches)

Gallay is having the worst time of his life and is basically a psychological horror protag

[mossolantern]

yknow, i've realized that some of my headcanons just make some characters worse people for no other reason than "its the vibe" or "i think it'd be funny if this were the case", sometimes a mix of both

[catman-draws]

Has he chosen yet

-Ghost

HE BUILT HIS CRAB

[sayakxmi]

One of the small details I really like is how, unless I'm mistaken, Nepeta is the only troll who doesn't look exactly like their ancestor, in this case The Disciple. But you know, who does? Alpha Meulin Leijon. Different universe and yet she still looks like herself.

It's such a neat thing, because they're both Heart players, and the aspect of Heart relates to the concept of self, so of course they would remain themselves no matter what.

[mysterioushistorian]

The Beforus Ancestors

honestly, i didnt like how the drawings turned out. i searched for references for the ancestors but i didnt manage to draw them the way i wanted to. most of the designs are okay, though i still feel like some of them are missing something, like colors.

more info abt them ↓

The Treasure Huntress (aka. Beforan Aradia) She was a very skilled adventurer and loved finding historic artifacts. She had a special taste for East Beforan art and culture. During her adventures, she met a violetblooded sea dweller who also had a fascination for history and dedicated his life to study and learn more about it. Together, they traveled along each other with the goal of learning more about the history of their planet, and eventually, they developed feelings for each other. However, the warmblooded girl was pale, while the coolblooded boy was red. The unspoken tension between each other lead to a fight, which ended in surprise on both sides over the admittance of feelings. Not wanting to disappoint each other, they agreed to just stay friends.

The Guardian (Beforan Tavros) He he stood up for the rights of trolls in special needs, and by that, he was also heavily against culling (as in the Beforan meaning of culling), saying that nobody should be treated that way (as helpless and fragile, making them too dependant) and by doing that, they would be "hiding the truth of the world from the children" by basically being way too overprotective. He was a farm boy, living in the country sides with his moirail, who mainly took care of the stables. Their farm was open to public visits, and one day, a certain coolblooded visitor has caught his attention. He wished to re-encounter with the man someday. One day, he has suffered a very sudden mutation that made him sprout wings, with him finally being able to realize his dream of traveling the world to spread the word about the dangers of culling and the rights of trolls in special needs.

(please correct me if I got the wrong meaning of Beforan culling, as I will talk about it again)

Radiical Psygamer (Beforan Sollux) He was, perhaps, the greatest programmer that Beforus has ever seen. With his magnificent skills, he was responsible for massively improving trolls’ technology and has contributed to the creation of a few robots and helped with the coding of various popular games. He was, however, a terrible teacher, given his introversion and general social awkwardness. He was a big figure in the world of console games and was the first to actively encourage girls to play games too.

The Unculled (Beforan Karkat) Because of his rare candy red blood, no lusus wanted to raise him, leaving him there all alone. One day, he was found by a purpleblooded man who took him to his hive in hopes that someone would pick him. They waited, and waited, and waited��� but no lusus came. Tired of waiting, the big troll decided to raise the grub himself. Because of his caretaker, the mutantblooded grew up to be loud, tough and intimidating, but had a big, friendly heart and cared for his loved ones a lot.

Sharpeye Furrline (Beforan Nepeta) She was a very skilled huntress. According to herself, she only killed what she ate, and if she didn’t eat, killing them would be mean. She could hunt creatures from a very small size to ones that were the double of her own. One day, while hunting for her dinner, she has killed a creature that was going to become a Lusus of a small wriggler. Therefore, she has accidentally unlocked the rage of a coolblooded troll. Terrified, she knew she couldn’t fight back, so she ran as fast as she could, far away from that beach. No one knows what happened to her.

The Seamstress (Beforan Kanaya) A rare jadeblood with a rare taste for fashion. She became known for her dresses with odd patterns, inspired by the landscapes around her. She also traveled in search of different sights and, consequently, more ideas for dresses. Her works have eventually caught the attention of the Empress, who offered her a job as her official seamstress.

The Attorney (Beforan Terezi) She was a blind woman who did not allow her disability to hold her back. She fought back against Beforus’ culling policy and became a excellent lawyer. Dedicating herself to fight against crime and bring justice to maintain the order and peacefulness of her planet, she chased a mischievous pirate lady who seemed to cause trouble everywhere she passed. She was The Unculled’s matesprit.

Arachnid Cap8tain (Beforan Vriska) A troublemaker who caused mischief together with her pirate crew. She considered The Attorney her rival, as she was the only one who insisted in chasing her and never gave up on her quest to capture the spider pirate. A completely platonic rivalry. She held a special interest for snooker and said that the Ball 8 was actually “her lucky ball”.

The Horseman (Beforan Equius) A STRONG man who really liked horses. He lived in a farm with his moirail and was responsible for taking care of the stables. Because of his interest, they ended up having way too many horses, which resulted in them having to build a larger stable for all of them. He loved every single one of them and took great care of each one. He said he occasionally had dreams where he was half a man and half a horse (basically a centaur), which is the origin of his title.

The Clownish Caretaker (Beforan Gamzee) He rescued lususless grubs and wrigglers with an absent lusus and took care of them temporarily, until a new lusus came to become their official guardian. Despite being tall, lanky and overall intimidating, he was a very sweet and cheerful man, and loved entertaining others. Just like others, he was also heavily against culling and said that “every motherfucker should know and be able to defend themselves.” One day, a lusus was coming to his hive to pick up a grub, but it was killed by Shapeye Furrline. The man never felt so much rage before. The pure platonic hate he held towards the woman was bigger than the amount of hate he thought he could feel. Despite that, and contrary to popular belief, he did not chase the lady and took him quite some time to calm down. He was responsible for raising The Unculled and made sure to treat him properly.

The Historian (Beforan Eridan) A seadweller with a huge fascination for history, he dedicated his life to learn more about the mysteries of his world. He read diares and looked for accurate informations, instead of believing in telltale stories. He studied ancient walls and occasionally collected some artifacts, purely for research reasons, and that’s when he met The Treasure Huntress. They decided to travel together, and it did not take long for him to become flushed for her. Unfortunately, she did not return the feelings, instead being pale for him. They agreed to stay friends, but very deep inside, he was still a bit disappointed.

Her Glorious Imperialist (Beforan Feferi) The ruler of Beforus. She was a very kind and sweet woman, undoubtedly one of the best rules Beforus has ever seen. She treated her people with fairness, yet despise that, she was pro-culling, saying that some should not face the dangers of the world. After offering a job for The Seamstress, she and the jadeblood grew close. Despite being the one in charge of the planet, she decided to take care of Arachnid Cap8tain herself, and being a seadweller, it wasn’t hard to find her. She still congratulated The Attorney for her efforts in chasing the troublemaker pirate.

[nekropsii]

Hi there! I've been looking through your blog a bit and I love it! I especially appreciate that you use different colors and formats, it makes it easier to read for me :D

If you wouldn't mind, is there any aspect of the alternian ancestors that you find interesting, particularly in their relation to the alpha trolls?

I think it's a little too obvious for me, the #1 Mituna Fan, to say that everything about The Psiioniic fucks me up, so I will jump into something a little more obscure.

I don't see a lot of people talk about The Signless's revolutions being sparked by him having visions of Beforus, despite the fact that Kankri and The Signless are basically the most popular of the Alpha Trolls and Ancestors respectively. That's fucked up, right? That's fucking wild. I don't even have anything articulate to say about this. It's just wild to me. The Signless, as a Seer of Blood, is able to see past a scratch through the force of blood connection. I wonder what those visions looked like...

[alphancestors-zine]

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[why-is-it-always-autumn]

The Beforan ancestors are so...

We know nothing about them. We know exactly who they were. Not one of them has ever spoken a single line in anything even canon-adjacent. Everyone can agree that He Would Not Say That. We know their full legal names. We don't know what anyone called them in adulthood. We can make some pretty solid predictions about their interpersonal relationships. We don't know which of them were even alive at the same time. We only know they exist because of a bunch of parodies of 2012 tumblr.

[lime-bloods]

i would LOVE a post on that. i have been thinking extensively about pitch romance and how deeply, cruelly toxic it is and how quadrants are in general. a lot of stuff is based in karkat's pov on it (and karkat is like. sooo biased love the guy to death but he is SO BIASED!!!) but sometimes it's in the narration and the existence of auspisticism & the fact that quadrants potentially existed on beforus trips me up as well...

this is a great question! and I suppose "the beginning" is probably the best place to start for a post about this, after all.

it's important to be aware that when we think of Beforus as a planet that is "good", this is not necessarily because it is wholly good by our own standards or even by the author's standards, but because it is good within Homestuck's philosophy, that the "good" is that which is "true" or "real", rather than what is "true" necessarily being good. to put this in another way - which I've only just recently begun to fully understand myself - Beforus being free of Lord English's corruption doesn't mean it's free of problems, just that it's problems are "real" problems, as opposed to fictional problems; they're reflective of problems we have on Earth.

pivotally, Beforus still has systems of gendered oppression, and in that sense it's clear how the intrinsically gendered violence of Alternia's quadrants would find their own place in Beforan society. it's just that in this context, these dynamics arise as part of complex sociological phenomena over thousands of years and aren't put in place solely for a specific purpose by an omnipotent time god, and as such won't necessarily manifest themselves in the exact same ways, or necessarily be "as bad". as with so many things in Homestuck, it's the idea at the core of the concept that's most important; kismesissitude and matespritship on Beforus should be recognisably the same idea as the quadrants on Alternia, just as they are recognisably the same "quadrants" practised by cherubs and humans, despite all of these arising from vastly different and largely disconnected cultural contexts.

the tendency for the same ideas to reliably bubble up to the surface again and again in different contexts is a central law of Homestuck's metaphysics: in the words of the reliable Doc Scratch, "there is essentially nothing new in paradox space." and it's relevant that Scratch is the one to relate this truism, because therein lies a crucial different in connotation between "storyteller" and "narrator"; it is not a narrator's job to invent new ideas, but rather to spin their own interpretation of what has already happened. this is why Scratch's ancestor stories are "troll fanfction"; he's writing an AU of characters who already lived on Beforus. we can only assume that, in the same vein, in "creating" Alternia's quadrants Scratch merely took those parts of Beforus that were convenient to his vision and amplified them to be all-important. (alchemy, as described by 9th century author Jabir ibn Hayyan, was the transmutation of one material into another by manipulating qualities that already existed within all matter, pushing some into the background and pulling others into the fore.)

it's easy to think of auspisticism, meanwhile, as unique among the quadrants in that it superficially seems to provide a service that is beneficial to all involved, and certainly towards Act 6 a lot of the children seem very interested in interpreting it this way. but in the narrative context in which it's introduced to us, I think it's clearly much more about control. as far as the ashen quadrant is concerned, what happens to the participants themselves is inconsequential; a successful ashen quadrant merely upholds the social idea of monogamy by stemming "widespread black infidelity." which is on its own a patently absurd idea: fidelity enforced by the race who practice punishable-by-death polygamy in order to mix all of their genes together in a single pool?! yes, it makes sense within the context of a nonsensically complicated alien reproductive process, but the nonsensical complicatedness of it all is entirely the point; the quadrants are designed to intersect in ways that not even the trolls themselves could ever fully understand. just as it's often impossible for a troll to distinguish between feelings that are platonic, pale or red, when Eridan attempts to "spark a rivalry wit)( [Sollux] to get [Feferi] to auspisticize [...] and pull us out of our quadrant" it's "t)(e oldest and lamest trick in t)(e book" precisely because it's the quadrant working exactly as intended! all of the quadrants serve to make relationships messier under the guise of making them more structured because messy relationships make for a great story, which is Alternia's fundamental purpose.

I think the Karkat point is worthy of another post deconstructing all the quadrants more broadly, because a lot of different things have been said about it already and it's worth getting into, but straightforwardly I think it must be understood that Karkat and "the narration" have fundamentally the same bias; the narrative wants us to take Alternia seriously because Alternia as a machine is a construction of the narrative for the purposes of the narrative, and Karkat wants us to take Alternia seriously because he's a massive stooge who has made his whole life's purpose out of buying into that narrative.

[cullee-for-beforan-culling]

hello, my name is INFOKIT. can you tell me more about beforan culling?

my information on this topic is limited, and i am open to recieving any information you can spare.

== This will be a long one, so I will place it below a cut. ==

[\\OOC: Warnings for forced sterilization, eugenics, and description of normalized atrocities from the perspective of someone who agrees with the practices.\\]

== Beforan culling was initiated by the Empress of Beforus, Her Altruistic Affirmation, as such, it is a multi-milenia old tradition. When SHE bested her predecessor in combat at the age of nine sweeps, SHE outlawed the previous notion of culling, and set about the cycle of refurbishing our eugenic system. SHE is a kind Empress, and as such was disgusted by the murderous form of culling HER predecessor affirmed, and sought a form of culling which killed none, without damning the species to complete uncontrolled degeneration.

She devised a method where individuals would be removed from the genepool, but without the barbarity of wanton murder: Surgically altering an unworthy, infirm troll as to be rendered inert, protecting the genepool from weakness, degeneration, and mutation.

Once these wastes-of-trolls were neutralized, they would be taken under the wing of an experienced troll who could supervise them and make certain they would never damage society with their mutant thoughts, incompetent natures, or treacherous inclinations.

The practice of neutralizing the culled has been challenged as of late by the woke mob. It is no longer mandatory, with eugenician recommendation, in some regions, or mandatory at all in others, inspired by the treatment of the protected castes no doubt. Suicidal idiocy. The fools seek to outlaw it entirely. Some claim chastity, filial registries, and the "honor system" are enough. As if. Our cancer's fecundity will be our species' downfall. Just one contaminated pail leads to generations of freaks. I know for a fact I am not the only descendant of my ancestor. ==

[dingodad]

i doubt any of the beforan "ancestors" got up to anything interesting as a rule anyway i think they were all too busy raising kids to be space pirates or whatever. except aradia who didn't have to raise anyone so she became a famous archaeologist